Monthly Archives: April 2015

Mirror, mirror….am I thin enough?

By the age of 6, girls start to express concerns about their weight or shape, according to the National Eating Disorders Association. Approximately half of elementary school girls (ages 6 through 12) are concerned about their weight or about becoming too fat.

The statistics on individuals struggling with eating disorders are startling. In the United States alone, 20 million woman and 10 million men struggle or have struggled with an eating disorder.

What is an eating disorder? I can tell you what it isn’t—a trend, a lifestyle or just a phase someone is going through. It is a serious problem that more often than not requires professional intervention. And the sooner the intervention takes place, the better the treatment outcome tends to be.

Help your kids be happy (summer) campers

Each day a new summer camp brochure arrives in my mailbox, perhaps in yours as well. My daughters have always enjoyed going to camps and I believe those camps have positively influenced my children.

Not only have my daughters explored and learned new things based on the theme of the camp, but participation has helped them to build positive character traits and develop social skills. They always came back with great stories to tell us and new friends to stay in touch with!

Foster parenting wisdom….a mix of love, acceptance and accountability

When you prepare a child for permanency, you come into contact with a lot of people—birth parents, foster parents, caseworkers, mental health providers, educational staff, and so on. It is a lot for a child to have so many people involved in this process. Certainly it can be hard to keep up with all of it and still manage to be a kid. There is no normalcy about the children’s or youths’ lives at this point.

Let me tell you about just one example, condensing the details considerably.